Nine-year-old Heather McNamara speaks directly to the camera in a matter-of-fact manner. “They just said go to Philadelphia,” she related. “Philadelphia didn’t want to touch me.
“They said go to Florida. Florida didn’t want to touch me. And then we went to all these hospitals. They just told us to go to all these places.”
A message appears on screen which informs us that Heather had a baseball-sized cancerous tumor lodged among her vital organs.”
We return to Heather on camera who says that she and her family finally found a place that didn’t send her elsewhere: New York-Presbyterian. Heather stumbles a bit in her pronunciation of “Presbyterian.” She tell us of Dr. Kato who agreed to operate.
A supered message reads, “In a 23-hour surgery, Dr. Tomoaki Kato temporarily removed six major organs in order to remove the tumor.”
The camera comes back to Heather who tells us how happy she is to be better and cancer free.
The spot ends with the New York-Presbyterian campaign mantra, “Amazing Things Are Happening Here.”
The “Amazing Stories” campaign spanning TV and the web was created by New York agency Munn Rabôt. “Heather” and other spots in the black-and-white campaign featuring candid monologues from real patients were directed by agency co-founder/creative director Peter Rabôt and edited by Antoine Mills of wild(child), New York. Production house on the job was Lost Highway Films, N.Y.
“I’ve worked in advertising for the past twenty-five years, but I’ve never been fortunate to do anything like this,” Rabôt said. “I know by the incredible reaction this work is getting that we have something here that goes way above advertising–it’s not easy to break through in this category. Antoine sat through many grueling days with creative director John Stingley and myself and was a great creative support throughout the process. He settled for nothing less than the best and helped take this work, and the category, to a totally new level.”
Maggie Smith, Star of Stage, Film and “Downton Abbey,” Dies At 89
Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" in 1969 and gained new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in "Downton Abbey" and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, died Friday. She was 89. Smith's sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital. "She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother," they said in a statement issued through publicist Clair Dobbs. Smith was frequently rated the preeminent British female performer of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with a clutch of Academy Award nominations and a shelf full of acting trophies. She remained in demand even in her later years, despite her lament that "when you get into the granny era, you're lucky to get anything." Smith drily summarized her later roles as "a gallery of grotesques," including Professor McGonagall. Asked why she took the role, she quipped: "Harry Potter is my pension." Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a television production of "Suddenly Last Summer," said she was "intellectually the smartest actress I've ever worked with. You have to get up very, very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith." "Jean Brodie," in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, brought her the Academy Award for best actress, and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) as well in 1969. Smith added a supporting actress Oscar for "California Suite" in 1978, Golden Globes for "California Suite" and "Room with a View," and BAFTAs for lead actress in "A Private Function" in 1984, "A Room with a View" in... Read More